Animal's People

Simon & Schuster; 374 pages; $25

This, it turns out, is a terrific way to start a novel that's fiercely engaged with questions of victimhood and pity. All the inhabitants of the poverty-stricken fictional Indian town of Khaufpur (literally "city of fear") are victims. Their lives were ruined one night 20 years before when an American chemical factory belched toxic fumes over their shanties (an incident clearly inspired by the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal), and they've survived since in a state of worsening health and spiraling litigation. They've also been telling their story over and over to little effect, and are sick of it.

So, when a foreign reporter promises Animal the possibility of thousands of other people looking through his eyes, his retort is sharp and funny: "Do [their] eyes s- on railway tracks?" Animal is 20 and hops about on all fours. His parents were killed on the night of the accident, his spine "twisted like a hairpin." He's a living grotesquerie. But instead of flaunting his wounds, he's prone to ranting, and when he finally agrees to speak - recording his words on tapes for the journalist after extracting a bribe of cargo shorts - he shuns the traditional Khaufpuri sob story for a surprising tale of hope.

The star of the proceedings is Animal's astounding voice. True and unapologetic, it is shot through with all the singsong cadences and cruel slang of cockney Hinglish. There is much pleasure to be had in hearing Animal crack joke after joke, brag about his unmentionables ("at least one part of me can stand upright"), snarl at his listeners ("Well, conscience I don't believe in, if I was given one I'd hand the f- thing straight back"), detail con operations in the slums and generally plead guilty to the charge of being a wild, unfettered beast.

He's tamed, as it were, by the promise of love. Wishing to impress a girl, he agrees to "jamispond" (a brilliant verb derived from the name James Bond) for a group of activists. The target of his spying mission is an idealistic American doctor who has set up a charitable clinic in Khaufpur, and whom the activists suspect of collusion with the evil American "Kampani." Needless to say, a friendship and mutual fascination soon springs up between Animal and the doctor, Elli Barber - Elli promising to cure Animal, Animal shinnying up a tree to catch a glimpse of her naked, white body. And it is Animal's struggle to find love and Elli's struggle to comprehend the cynicism of victims that are the twin engines of this gently paced novel.

Sinha is at heart a writer of childlike skits (if two of his characters like music, for example, they must fall in love), and he cycles us through a loose cast of small-time hoodlums, tea shack owners, corrupt ministers and orphans, with clear sympathy for the underdog. He is quick to flip initially evil characters onto their sunny sides. The women are decent but appallingly flat. They also undress right in front of their windows.

It's this tendency toward convenience and a correlated unwillingness to do harm to his characters that prevents Sinha's novel from being termed a "classic": Nothing truly unexpected happens. There is a final confrontation between the American company and the residents of Khaufpur, but Sinha perpetuates the victimhood of Animal's people by not letting them be martyred when the time comes. Like the Indian justice system, which has delayed judgments endlessly both in the fictional Khaufpur and the real Bhopal, he seems unable to make a tough decision.

The most disappointing aspect of the novel, however, is the cloud of cliched prose that settles over it toward the end. As Khaufpur rumbles with riots, Animal suddenly becomes the messianic commentator for a mass movement, speaking in long, biblical sentences and wandering through a hallucinatory jungle (get it? Animal in the jungle?). This makes for a muddled read; it is also impossible to reconcile with the conceit that Animal is recording his thoughts on tape. Similarly hard to swallow are Animal's recurring conversations with a preserved fetus and a mad French nun. How can Animal possibly learn French from a woman who speaks no Hindi? It's as if Sinha could keep neither himself nor his magic-realist inheritance completely out of the book (he lives in France and is an Indian writer).

"Animal's People" is most riveting when the author forgets he is narrating a socially important novel and has Animal boasting, riffing, thriving and frothing. Indeed, better novels may be written in the future about the unrelenting aftermath of such a chemical disaster, but Sinha performs an act long overdue in the canon of Indian literature in English: giving the poor a voice that sounds like their own.